Efforts to improve decision making in mental and community health wins Florence Nightingale Award for Excellence in Healthcare Data Analytics

The winner of the Florence Nightingale Award for Excellence in Healthcare Data Analytics 2022, jointly awarded by the Health Foundation and the Royal Statistical Society, has been announced. Now in its third year, the award recognises practitioners in applied health care data analytics who have gone the extra mile in delivering innovative improvements for the health care system. 

This year’s award has been given to the Visual Analytics Team at East London NHS Foundation Trust for their project to develop an improvement-focused quality management system using integrated apps. The team used data visualisation software to develop a series of apps to provide staff with easy access to clinical and non-clinical information that can help with decision making.  

Covering mental and community health in east London, Luton and Bedfordshire, the apps provide data and analysis across a variety of areas so that teams can increase efficiency. The apps provide integrated analysis of quality, population health, patient flow and team-based tasks so that staff can better understand wait times, review their caseloads, gain insights into patient demographics and be alerted of serious incidents.  

The project involved developing a new suite of functionality within Microsoft Power BI, an interactive data visualisation software product developed by Microsoft, to create statistical process control charts, which were not previously available. The team developed these in partnership with a Microsoft Gold Partner, Cloud2, and they are now available to all Power BI users.  

Josh Keith, Assistant Director of Data Analytics at the Health Foundation, said:  

'The pandemic has shown us the importance of innovation in the use of analytics and data-driven technology. Better use of data and analytics will also be crucial to the recovery of the NHS and social care moving forward. The winning project is ambitious and has been shown to be effective, bringing together a wealth of information, in easily accessible forms, to help with decision making. It is also great to see the use of real-time data, and the efforts of the team in championing the good use of data across the organisation.'

Stian Westlake, Chief Executive of the Royal Statistical Society, said: 

'Data analysts play such an important but sometimes underappreciated role in improving our healthcare systems. This year’s winning team has gone above and beyond in their use of data to improve mental and community health across their NHS trust, while ensuring patient and carers views are taken into account at every step of the process. A massive congratulations to them all.'